


The Heart is a Badly Built Bridge

by EnglishAsSheIsSpoke



Series: This Is How It Works [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Booker's Gap Century, Booker's Great Escape, Booker's Longsuffering Family Despairs of his Choices, Gen, In This House We Ship Facing The Consequences of Your Actions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-01
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:20:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 19,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26744275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EnglishAsSheIsSpoke/pseuds/EnglishAsSheIsSpoke
Summary: Booker carries the weight of his immortality and all his subsequent choices with all the grace that anyone could expect.AKA Sebastien Le Livre, Human Disaster.
Relationships: Booker x Denial, Booker x Family, Booker x Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Booker | Sebastien le Livre's Wife
Series: This Is How It Works [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2011234
Comments: 79
Kudos: 180





	1. Got This Feeling That Today Doesn't Like Me

"And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes."  
_Slaughterhouse-Five_ , Kurt Vonnegut

There is a moment – after Joe has turned away and followed the others up the stairs and out of sight, the last second possible for Booker to chase after them and beg, prostate on his knees, for absolution he does not deserve – a yawning moment where Booker turns back to the ocean, to the horizon, and thinks in the blank shock of all his failures: _What now?_

The horizon does not answer and the waves barely lapping at the stone shore, as always, speak only of long-lost iron tombs. Booker, by turns, loves and hates the ocean. He has slept and woken on the ocean floor so many times it is beyond the ability to count, tasted its salt and felt the breeze of its currents. Now standing before it, Booker imagines walking below the surface, surrendering his self to the abyss. A pagan sacrifice. Ah, but it would be pointless. What does he offer to any waiting god? Not his death, nor his faith. Only a body he cannot escape. There is no worth there, not when he is desperate to give it away. 

It was a relief they didn’t try to understand his reasons. That, in their need to recover any sense of equilibrium, they fled his presence as soon as was feasible. In the pub they sat in court and Booker, the accused having plead guilty, was not required to argue his case or witness his sentencing. If they had asked, if Joe had, in his anger, demanded a further explanation, Booker’s only answer would further inflame him. And if Nicky had taken his hand, ducking his head to meet Booker’s downturned eyes and inevitably draw his face upwards, and asked if he was sorry, Booker could say honestly yes but Nicky would see the entire truth of it nonetheless. 

_I am sorry you were hurt. I am sorry I failed._ Two opposing facts can be simultaneously true. _I am sorry I hurt you. I am sorry it was all for nothing._

Fortunately they didn’t ask and as such, Booker has been given one mercy on this merciless day. Instead they could not talk to him. Would not. Only Nile and Andy. 

Andy. 

He throws another stone at the water. He is slowly realising it is an unconscionable relief that he is now alone. It is almost no punishment to withdraw. In fact, it would be worse to be with them. To pull himself back together after his failure and shoulder the weight of their grief – oh, it would be a cruel and heavy thing. In his banishment, Booker would be able to mourn the loss of this crack in the doorway, this one hope he held in his despair that the chains would be unbound. His weakness is not nakedly held before them. His shame is yet able to crawl beneath the rocks, a multi-legged, clawed, cunning creature that lives behind his ribs, in the very heart of him.

So what to do. He has nowhere to go. He has everywhere to go. The burden of this is unbearable. And yet it must be borne. He cannot remain on this beach for a hundred years. 

Booker wants a full flask of whiskey and the solid foundation of Andy’s presence at his side, the certainty of Nicky and Joe teasing each other, an easy camaraderie shifting and reforming like sand dunes in the wind. He wants to watch over Nile, help her in the early years he remembers being like sand in his teeth. He wants the choice of being near them, a reticent cat with its back turned against affection. 

_Marie._ Booker reaches for her name like a child reaching for a comforting touch. _Marie, what do I do. Please, Marie._

There has never been an answer to his pleas and there never will be. 

Booker leaves the shoreline and relocates himself to the nearest bar. Tomorrow, whether he wakes from a drunken stupor or an accidental death, is when the counting of his century begins. What else is there to do? And who knows, perhaps Death will find him in a gutter and finally carry him away. Booker can only put himself there and hope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Story and first chapter title are from 'Utilities' by The Weakerthans.


	2. And There's Nothing You Can Do About It Now

“The most fundamental thing about a person is desire. It defines them. Tell me what a person wants, truly wants, and I'll tell you who they are, and how to persuade them.”

― Max Barry, _Lexicon_

It is easy, all too easy, to let days wash past and over him like sets of waves on the tide. Helped by spirits and a lack of spirit, Booker descends embarrassingly quickly into a quagmire of depression and apathy.

He arrived in Paris after the team’s departure on the beach. Shaggy and unshaven, bereft of hope, companions, and any wardrobe. He picked the lock on this safe house, intending to bathe, change clothes, rest, and decide on a course of action. He managed only to step into the kitchen, retrieve a bottle of wine, and dive straight into his cups. There he has stayed for months on end. Why should he not? His pair of centuries have taught him to function no matter what he feels and so he keeps his apartment and body more or less clean and tidy. He would not be mistaken for one of the homeless lingering on the corners. He might stagger on occasion when he steps out for groceries, or slur a little when he offers a paltry greeting to the clerks, but he blends in with the crowd. A sad man, one of thousands in the city, going about his day and nothing more.

He thinks of Marie. He is trying to hold the grains of sand tight in his clenched fists. Andy told him he would forget and he would not be able to stop it from happening, but they are unnatural creatures so why then should that law of nature apply also. He believes, always a traitor, that Andy chose to forget. Andy, his beloved friend, he does not believe he is like her in this. And so he thinks of Marie often. He cannot do otherwise.

Marie begging him to share his gift with Henri, their dying child, their second, so young and so fragile. His beautiful golden hair like wheat in the fields and his eyes so blue, his cries of pain. Weeping at the grave and looking at him with a distance that had never been there before. Sickness took her next before her love turned too bitter, though he knew she feared him a little before the end. When she died, choking on blood from her lungs, she still held his hand, still begged him to care for their remaining children. Not to let them suffer and die. As though Sebastien had _let_ anything happen. All choice seemed to have abandoned him when he chose Napoleon’s Grand Armée over a prison sentence, desperate for any slim chance to live and see his family again. The one choice he would unmake if he could. Perhaps if he had never been a soldier. Perhaps he might have lived and died with them.

Tears had rolled down Sebastien’s cheeks as he offered all of himself to God if He would just save her. Why could she be allowed to die when Sebastien, in all his unworthiness, had reprieve after reprieve forced upon him. God did not heed him and she died and Sebastien could do nothing but bear witness. It was a terrible, terrible thing and he was not himself for some time afterwards, though he tried to be for his sons. In the aftermath Sebastien had felt the loss not only of Marie but of something precious inside him. Perhaps despite all his sins and wrongdoing, his deaths and his accursed immortality, he had held tight onto some inner grace. For her. For them. And now she was gone and that grace felt like it was a useless, pitiful thing in the face of the world. It retracted and convulsed like a leech sprinkled with salt.

A family is a world unto its own, and worlds don’t disappear until all memory of them have passed. Sebastien held every memory of his family, for good and for ill, like a dragon hoarding gold. He holds on still. The lone member of a club, sitting by himself, turned and staring longingly at the door, hoping for another member to walk in. Perhaps he ought to leave. Shut the door and lock it, lose the key, let it fall into abandoned disrepair, as Andy had. But he couldn’t. It would unmake him. Who was he without them? Sebastien didn’t want to know. He refused to find out. And in refusing he turned his love into a curse, his presence into– 

Anyway. What good does it do to turn these faded thoughts over and over. He had advised Nile as best he could, warned her of what could come of holding onto what they said was not meant to be held forever. Took years of time away from her in the hopes her love would remain untouched. Was that a sin also? He could not see a clear path – every step was strewn with broken glass, hazards both known and unexpected. Andy told him to warn her with his example and so he did, baring his twisted heart, and there was nothing else to be done.

A hundred years. What is he supposed to do with it? Is he expected to be better for it? Booker feels like a child banished to a corner, told to think about what he’s done. How to explain he had worked through the idea for years beforehand, picking up and putting down his search for a release. Copley timed his approach well but Booker was ready for it. Eager in his clawing desperation. He does not know if they want him to return to them changed for this experience, though it seems likely. They will not gladly welcome him back as he is.

With his forger’s heart and mind and hands, he could again find the version they wish to see and carve himself into it. Bevel the edges of himself to pass scrutiny. But he does not see a path to change. Only a slow, decrepit fall into waste. He supposes this is depression. He cannot see a way clear of it. All the doors are closed and the windows locked. As such, he waits for time to pass for him. It's easy. He drinks and the days are long and short and disappear all at once.

Summer fades into autumn. Paris embraces the seasonal change, the aggressive heat fading into a more elegant climate. Booker has no love for the city. Even the language says to him again and again that his home is not only far away, it is gone forever. This is a strange, cruel torture and he doesn’t quite understand why he has chosen it. Somehow inertia and entropy do battle over his body and come to an unsatisfying draw.

Time passes relentlessly.

One day, Booker has been removed from a bar and visited a Franprix, a rumpled sight in the uniform colours and shapes of the supermarket, dodging tourists and locals alike. It is a beautiful day and Parisians are out like flocks of bright birds. He collects a bottle of scotch, drinks much of it sitting in a park, and returns to the apartment to drink in peace and quiet. Today he himself almost feels energised. Today he might turn his laptop on and pursue an actual job. Today he might pull the ragged corners and sharp edges of himself together into something useful. First though, he must swig from the bottle as his feet guide him back to the apartment. He must not let the clouds part. He is almost a happy drunk today. Perhaps after all these years he has pickled his brain into changing its chemistry. Is it possible? Surely not.

What time is it though? Booker has always found it easiest to be in the middle of the day. As distant as possible from the hope of a sunrise or romance of a sunset, safe from the grim hours of night. At noon he feels certain he sleeps dreamlessly, a fairy-tale hope that the midday sun protects him from monsters real and imagined. So it is only a little into the afternoon when Booker arrives at his door, checks his pockets for his keys, and sees a blinking light on his phone.

His burner has a missed call and a notification of a voicemail. He has no numbers saved and so it is simply an innocuous set of digits listed as the contact. He is drinking heavily and he didn’t hear the sound of it ringing or perhaps it’s set to silent, perhaps he heard it and ignored it, he cannot remember in his haze. Beginning to feel the threat of an aching head, he is tipping quickly from a wall of drunkenness into the oncoming truck of a hangover. Booker stares at the screen, a sinking stone in his chest, then puts it away with the intention of listening to the voicemail when he is safe behind the locked down of his apartment. He is afraid of who the message is from. It hasn’t even been a year. They would not reach out but for the worst of circumstances.

 _Andromache_ , he thinks. _Not yet. You told me to have a little faith and against all reason I have done this for you. Not yet, Andy._

He stumbles over the building’s threshold and drops the bottle. He kicks the glass in a sudden fury before weariness overtakes him and he sits, despairing, on the staircase. For a moment, just a moment, as he drops his head into his hands, Booker is stricken with exhaustion. He cannot bear hearing the news of Andy’s final death. He finds his keys and moves forward nonetheless. His door is ajar.

His door is ajar.

A gun is in his hand, pulled from the waistband of his jeans. Booker, his heart pumping the alcohol faster through his blood, enters his apartment cautiously and finds a woman waiting for him. He knows her. He knows. Booker has only known her face contorted with terror, pain and rage, but he would recognise her anywhere. There she stands, sipping a glass of water.

 _Ah,_ he realises all too slowly, the thoughts treacle-thick. _The phone call. The voicemail._

“Booker. It’s nice to finally meet you.”

Standing before Quynh with the gun steady in his hands and shock beating a thrumming rhythm in his chest, Booker wishes he had answered his phone. Or at least been brave enough to listen to the voicemail he imagines is a warning. He is cursed, he thinks wryly, with a truly incredible ability to instinctively sabotage himself at every turn. Joe would cuff him over the head for this, a fond recrimination Booker longs for. Especially when Quynh smiles and he hears the slightest sound of a footstep behind him. When he turns, he is met at speed by a bullet to the temple.

Then there is nothing.

Booker wakes up. Waking up from being shot cleanly in the head is one of the easier resurrections. The bullet is forcibly ejected by his healing brain, his skull seals shut, and the skin grows over like a flawless patch on a punched wall. This he knows because he has seen it happen countless times to the others. It takes seconds rather than minutes or hours. Because of this, Booker also knows they have moved quickly to tape his wrists, knees and ankles. He wakes up on the floor, propped on his side, Quynh kneeling beside him as she gently cups his face.

“Tell me,” she says. “Where is Andromache?”

Her voice is beautiful. So are her eyes. Booker could believe in her soft touch if he was not lying in a pool of his own blood and brains. “When did you get free? How, Quynh?”

Had his dreams changed? They must have. He remembered little when he drank and he had been stringently avoiding sobriety for months. His dreams, the dreams of an alcoholic, are fevered, blurred nonsense. He had tasted salt water in his sleep, he was sure. Had he dreamed of her lately? He could not tell. Did she dream of him? What did she see?

Quynh waits for him to answer. Her patience is relentless. Booker, off kilter, shaken, answers first.

“I don’t know. I don’t know where they are, I cannot help you. Quynh,” he says urgently. “Andy searched for you for many yea-”

She tapes his mouth shut. Then his eyes.

Tied up, blindfolded, they take him to what he presumes is a van. Carried out in his only rug, of all the indignities. They don’t even unwrap him once he is deposited in the vehicle. Instead he is left like a poorly made cigar to try and divine where they are taking him by discerning the turns of the road and the time spent travelling. He makes little progress until they arrive at their destination and he recognises the scent of the ocean, little good though it does him. They carry him again and he is dropped with a thud onto what he realises is a rocking boat. The engine starts and they sail for a long time before it cuts out. Booker spends the time trying to break the tape, managing only to tear up his skin and ponder his predicament.

Finally he is unrolled. Something is clasped around his neck, a sensation he does not care for. It is weighty in more ways than one; it raises unwelcome memories. He is brought to his feet, held in place. The tape is torn from his eyes and his mouth. In the time it takes his vision to adjust, blinking quickly, Booker figures out his situation. It is not… ideal.

In short, he is in the middle of the ocean on a boat with Quynh and an unconfirmed number of subordinates. He is bound in duct tape and there is a metal collar around his throat, of which one end of a heavy chain is attached.

Quynh stands before him. A pit viper, Joe had said. She waits for him to take in his bindings and then she speaks.

“I ask again, where is Andromache? Where are Nicolo and Yusuf? You cannot keep them from me. I am owed this. They owe me this.” There is a banked rage in Quynh’s words, curdled in her throat. She does not mean to find them for a joyous reunion, this Booker knows.

Perhaps there is a debt owed. Booker cannot say how the scales are balanced between the four of them. But he is not going to add to the many shames he has collected by giving up his estranged family. If he tried he could track them down, he is certain. Copley is excellent at his work but Booker has the advantage of personal experience. He knows their habits and he knows how they hide those habits to avoid being tracked. He had never been a hunter when he was just a man but he knows now how to run prey to the ground. They taught him a predator’s instinct all too well.

This must remain locked away. He is a forger at his heart and he can make a lie hide in the truth. “Listen to me, please. I don’t know where they are. I haven’t seen or heard from them for months and I can’t reach them. I betrayed them and was exiled for it. I don’t know where they are, I swear to you!”

Quynh, once more, is thoughtful. This is only the beginning of their time together and she has yet to make her opening salvo. How will she try to convince him to spill his knowledge out upon on the deck. Then she sighs and she says:

“We will speak again in one hour.”

For a moment, Booker can feel the sunlight on his face, the wind rifling through his hair. The moment stretches out into a single eternity, enough time for him to breathe in and understand what is about to be done, then a gentle push from Quynh sends Booker falling backwards off the boat and into the ocean. The heavy chain drags him down into the depths. Deep enough that his ears pop painfully and the light fades. Deep enough that it seems he is floating in an empty nothingness. Deep enough that when his breath cannot be held any longer, the last bubbles of oxygen breathed out to rise to the surface without him, and he takes the water into his lungs, it is almost restful.

Then he wakes and the cycle begins.

He breathes in reflexively and chokes on the water, his body seizing and spasming, his eyes wild and his fingers grasping helplessly on nothing. Then blankness. Then he wakes. He breathes in reflexively and chokes on the water, his body seizing and spasming, his eyes wild and his fingers grasping helplessly on nothing. Then blankness. Then he wakes. He breathes in reflexively and chokes on the water, his body seizing and spasming…

An hour passes. It must. During one drowning he feels tension on the chain before the water claims him again. Then he is hoisted by the neck above the surface of the water. Once the water is not there to support the weight of his body, he chokes on the collar, hanged, water bubbling from his lips as he kicks his restrained legs, helpless and graceless like a caught fish. He is dropped on the deck of the boat, gasping at the air. His lungs finally fill with oxygen. He feels like a torn open thing, gutted and pinned. The light is fading and it will be dark soon, even darker down below. He hopes, hopelessly, that Quynh can be talked down. He knows that she won’t be and that he is going to be put back into the water. 

“Now,” Quynh says, “Where is Andromache?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from ‘Blood’ by The Middle East, though more heavily inspired by the Like A Version cover by Gang of Youths.


	3. Take Me Back Home, Take Me Back Home

“I have no mouth. And I must scream.”

― Harlan Ellison, _I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream_

On a freezing winter day a year after he is hanged from a tree for deserting a cause he doesn’t believe in or care to starve for, Sebastien is possessed by what Edgar Allen Poe would call, some thirty years later, the Imp of the Perverse. He sharpens their best and largest knife to a razor edge, places his left hand on a block, and briskly cuts it off. The blood gushes quickly and he is not prepared to stop the bleeding. The pain of it overtakes his mind. For some reason it had not occurred to him just how much it would hurt. And so his vision blurs and his poor head drops down next to his poor left hand and his poor wife walks through the door to be met by this sight and the last thing he sees before he dies is her mouth opening to scream.

He wakes again before his hand is regrown, more quickly than he expected. This is fortunate because otherwise he may have had to explain his troublesome immortality to the nearest doctor, whom Marie is about to fetch for help. It is also unfortunate because regrowing a hand hurts terribly and is not that wonderful to watch to boot. Marie is shouting all the while, calling him selfish and insane, what if their children had seen it, their table is covered in his blood, so where does he expect them to eat? She is a wild thing and cannot look at his poor maimed limb nor the discarded hand left like a dead spider curled up on the table. Sebastien will bury it later, baffled as to why he did what he did.

When Marie asks him later what it is he hoped to accomplish, he has no answer. His body did not feel his own, that is all he can think of. She then suggests tentatively that they might visit a priest.

“To pray for my poor lost hand?”

Marie laughs in a small way. She also looks worried. There are small lines bracketing her eyes, a thin crease between her eyebrows, neither of which were there only a few years ago. He has aged her prematurely. He kisses the little crease, runs a thumb across her cheek.

“Don’t worry, my love. We will be okay.”

Sebastien doesn’t mean for it to be a lie.

That night he dreams again of the warrior woman, the two men, the three of them together travelling through the accursed landscape of Russia, and a poor soul lost in the ocean, drowning and drowning and drowning.

Booker tells Quynh the story about his hand and she laughs softly as she pours him tea. She holds up a bottle of bourbon in question.

“Please,” he says politely, and she tips a generous amount in. She holds the mug up to his lips so he can drink. The tea is perfectly brewed and the bourbon is bracing. His hands are numb, still restrained behind him – this is what made him think of his first left hand, buried long ago in La Ciotat.

Quynh sips her own, unaltered tea and carefully sets down her teacup. She is seated cross-legged on the deck of the boat, elegant and graceful. Booker is propped up against the side, his legs also still taped together and propped out in front of him. His clothes are crusted with salt, itchy and stiff. It is the strangest tea party he has ever attended.

“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places,” She quotes Plutarch, verbatim and inexorable. Booker would be at a loss but that he has had this debate with Joe many times, arguing either opinion depending on their moods. “Insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”

Booker shrugs. There are no true answers. Not for them. “What does it matter if I am Theseus’s ship or not? Here I am, nonetheless.”

“Booker, you are not the mortal man you were. No part of you remains. I have seen your deaths. I know this to be true. So why do you hold onto little mortal ideas? We have been needlessly afraid for so long. Long ago, Andromache was worshipped as a god,” Quynh stands, regal like a marble statue. “This is the way we are meant to live. Not in hiding, not in fear. This world belongs to us. Andromache knew this once, though she has forgotten it now. Now I have been released upon the world, I will show her the truth of it. I will show you all.”

She steps close enough that Booker could try to hurt her, a token sign of resistance. Instead, he is frozen by her words. She leans forward and kisses his forehead, caresses his face. “Don’t fear what’s to come, Sebastien. I will show you the path to godhood.”

Again he descends. It is darkest black and he cannot see anything. There is no path, only a chain around his neck. The water fills his lungs, presses on his skin, encasing him inside and out. Booker is terribly, terribly afraid.

The hangman’s noose is not well tied, nor is Sebastien going to drop and break his neck. No, he is to be strung up and hanged until he chokes to death. It is no better than a coward like he deserves, so his compatriots say. They kick at his legs, spit on him, curse his name. They hate him because he is proof there is no escape from the cold, starving torment of this campaign. He could not get away from it and neither can they. They are all doomed.

Sebastien is so cold he can barely recall Marie’s face. Their sons are lost to him. The winter snow and wind are vicious things, they unmake men into beasts. Now he is caught, he can only think of death. It will be a relief. He longs for it. He might not be warm once he is dead but at least he will no longer be cold. _I’m sorry_ , he thinks to whoever cares to listen, tears freezing on his eyelashes. _I only wanted to live._

He is hanged and he dies slowly. His body swings back and forth for a time before coming to stillness.

The camp is nearby but not close enough to see his feet twitch as he revives from his first death. Or perhaps they think his body is played with by the cruel wind. Sebastien doesn’t know and he is occupied with other concerns. He does not know he died. He dies repeatedly and when he revives, he doesn’t understand what has happened, only that he yet lives but must pretend to be dead so as not to alert anyone that he is living.

Each time he wakes up from visions of people he has never met. They are somewhere warm. They are companions. They are fighting. They are in a body of water. He tastes salt. The ocean. He wakes again. Three times has he woken blind and realised the sharp pain is a bird pecking at his eyes. The carrion have been offered up an eternal feast.

On the third day, the camp moves on. To where he cannot imagine. What he can imagine is the taste of the crow’s blood. Blind, he wakes yet again. The crow is perched on his shoulder, cawing in his ear. It does not expect him to desperately reach up and take hold of it, tear into it with his teeth while it struggles and screams. Its blood is the hottest thing he has ever felt, so warm on his frozen lips that it seems to burn. He drinks and eats until the meat and viscera are gone, choked down his constricted throat. With a monster’s strength he grasps at the rope above him, pulls at the frozen knot. His nails crack and tear. He drops and cannot catch himself. His ankles break with a sickening crack, then heal. His face is sticky with blood.

He is certain he is in Hell.

The boat rocks back and forth. There are no clouds overhead. Was there night? Was there a sunrise? Booker stares upwards. He doesn’t recall. Quynh was wearing red when last he saw her. Now she is draped in white, protected from the glare of sunlight on ice as she holds a glass of water to his mouth. The cold burn of winter is searing his skin, he can feel the bite of it though it will not last. It will heal and he must continue on, staggering through the skeletal trees. No, no, they are on the ocean, and these are waves, not drifts of snow. It is salt on his lips, not crusted ice. Booker swallows the water and Quynh asks, “Are you with me?”

Booker stares at her blearily and it must be an answer, though he doesn’t understand the question. Hasn’t he always been with her? Haven’t they resided together at the bottom of the ocean ever since this long terrible life began? But she is not yet satisfied.

Down, down, down he goes. The abyss calls his name and he feels certain he is hallucinating when he feels the sun on his face. No, he is above again, risen, always rising and falling. Has it been another day, two days, more? He has lost track of cruel time’s passage. He has lost track of himself. When he is removed from the water, he struggles to answer questions, his mind drifting into shock as his body relentlessly heals and heals and heals. Sometimes he looks around and sees a winter landscape, feels frostbite take his fingers and toes. Snowflakes drifts down though there isn’t a cloud in the sky. Quynh stands in simple, light clothing. It is not enough, she will freeze and he cannot help her.

“Quynh, how are you here?” He asks in Occitan, gasping, writhing, “We must- we must go, they will come and they will kill us both.”

There is the tree. There is the rope. There is the waiting crow. Oh God, he does not want to be blinded again.

Quynh, so gentle in touch, but a fire in her eyes, “Sebastien, do you see? We are eternity embodied. Andromache was wrong, we aren’t meant to save the world. We are the fire made to remake the world. You must tell me where the others are so I can share this with them also. Where can I find them?”

He comes back to himself a little. He promised he would not do this one thing. He starts crying, for Quynh, for himself, for his poor families who he has only ever known to love, badly or otherwise.

“I cannot tell you. I will not.”

The fire rages and she is not gentle when she kicks him off the boat.

The water invades him again.

It is on the third day that Booker wakes up again not in the ocean’s void but on the deck, shuddering reflexively, so very tired, the familiar sensation of vomiting up salt water convulsing his stomach, to find Nicolo learning over him, holding his face, eyes always so kind and piercing. “Booker. Wake up, _fratello_. Wake up, Sebastien. We are here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from ‘Walking Far From Home’ by Iron & Wine.


	4. The Many Things You Owe These Latest Dead

“Death followed by eternity - the worst of both worlds. It is a terrible thought.”

― Tom Stoppard, _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead_

His sons are hysterically relieved to see him, since word has not travelled that Sebastien Le Livre is a traitorous deserter, and an executed one at that. Little Jean-Pierre attempts to climb him like a tree and the others engulf him with embraces and laughter and happy tears. He has been horrified by his own body, his dreams, even the clothes he wears stolen from corpses littered on frozen battlefields – everything about and in him seems polluted with death. But his boys are joyous at the sight of him and that is enough. Marie sobs in his arms and litters his face with kisses – she has forgiven him for being foolishly arrested.

Everything now, he thinks, will be fine. He still doesn’t entirely understand what happened in Russia or what he has become, because he cannot believe his nightmares and he feels a terrible kernel of horror when he allows himself to see the truth lurking in the shadows of his mind. No, Sebastien is home now and all can continue on as it once was.

But the figures from his sleep step ever closer and closer along the same path he travelled from that twisted tree.

He wakes from dreams, wild eyed and wet with sweat. He tells Marie finally late on a summer evening, when the air is dense with humidity and he cannot contain it any longer. She listens only after he stabs his thigh with a knife repeatedly, and is left without a mark. She doesn’t truly believe him until he takes the same knife and cuts his wrists, her denials dying on her lips as she looks at the pumping blood in terror. He dies and comes back to find her clutching his arms and weeping. When he says her name, she looks up at him in shock, viciously slaps his cheek and continues crying. He could not lie to her and now this burden is laid upon them both. It is his first immortal regret.

Henri is struck by a runaway horse scared out of control by a sudden flash of lightning only weeks later. He dies too slowly and too quickly, in pain and without aid. Sebastien can only hold him, helpless and panicked while Marie screams for him to do something.

She grows restless also and complains of headaches, of always feeling tired in her bones. She is moody and snappish and he is worried, always worried. She loses weight until she is slim and then moreso until she is skin and bones. Sebastien tries making her favourite foods, only to be turned away or for the plate to be picked at half-heartedly. Marie still finds comfort being held in his arms, held snugly against his broad chest. She asks him why he heals, how it happened, how can he help her? The light hurts her eyes. The light is too much.

The sun shines into his eyes, burning Booker’s vision into a haze. The rescue is a blur. Booker expects his mind currently resembles Swiss cheese, which would explain how the moment jumps away from him each time he blinks. They are all there. They have guns trained on Quynh. Then Joe is cutting him loose. Then Quynh is stating something like it is a foundation of existence and Andy is devastated, though it only shows in her eyes. Gunfire. He is lifted to his feet, dragged away from Quynh, whom he wants very much to reach towards but does not, then is dumped off the side of the boat for the millionth goddamned time. At least now it is to land on another boat, presumably theirs. He staggers as he stands, tries to catch himself on the rail, misses and falls to the floor as the engine revs and they speed away. He must appear drunk, which is annoying since sadly for once he is sober as a judge. He somehow feels calm and hysterical at the same time. He must breathe and calibrate. He sits finally and hangs his head. There is a hand on his knee and the small gesture tethers him to the earth.

As they travel back to land, away from the ocean’s liminal space, Nile breaks the silence. “So… I’m guessing Quynh was expecting us.”

Booker lifts his head, laughs and finally speaks, a hacking ragged low voice from deep within his lungs. He cannot stop the words spilling out and because he is often not very nice, neither does he try. “Want to bet? $500, Nicolo? Yusuf, are you all in?”

It is very cruel of him, to make this joke. Joe looks at him with frustration and hurt. It’s made worse because Joe is concerned for him, is twisted into knots by his reluctant care, is punished by loving him. His expression is therefore very complicated. Booker can only make eye contact for a moment before his eyes blink away again. They are all so raw. He feels like a throbbing, exposed nerve. He ought not to have said that.

Andy is away from them. She stares back to where they left Quynh. Every part of her but her body is beyond the horizon, her eyes far away and filled with agony of the soul. He cannot help her. They cannot help each other. Lord above, what are they going to do?

It seems he is moved from place to place, because they are on a boat, then they are in a car, then he is in a kitchen. Booker wants to find his self-will but everything is distant and he’s lost as to what he should do next. Joe and Nicky help him in the shower. His fingers, so accustomed to skilled, delicate work, cannot seem to work the buttons of his ragged shirt. They bathe him, washing away the salt on his skin, encrusted in his hair. Joe dries him, leads him to the bed and pushes him down on top of the bare mattress, covers him with a blanket. Booker considers teasing him with a comment that he would have found sheets and made the bed properly if he were Nicky, but in a moment of better judgement chooses to remain silent instead.

Nicky stands in the doorway, backlit into a familiar silhouette. A low humming fills the room. It is Joe singing softly as he draws, sitting by the bed. They pile kindness upon undeserved kindness by saying nothing when his breath shudders and shakes.

Booker falls asleep without meaning to, between one wet blink and the next. It’s a dreamless sleep, like death, and so when he wakes again, the passage of time is marked only by the shifting light. He doesn’t move or alert the others, as they might have recognised the changing rhythm of his breath. He is thinking of Quynh, wondering where she might be. For some reason, he feels certain she must be standing on the roof like a terrible horror film cliche, waiting at the window, hiding in the wardrobe, perched just behind him, watching his vulnerable back. He waits for her to tap him on the shoulder and lean to his ear, dripping salt water, cooing, “Booker, do you see, do you see?”

But of course the moment doesn’t come and his breathe is a foolish, panicked race horse galloping away from him. His heart, a traitor, is going to burst. It’s the everyday sound of a pot being dropped and Joe loudly yelping and cursing creatively in the next room that breaks the ambient tension. Booker sucks in one last breathe through the straw of his throat and curls up like a pill bug, one feeble action to hide from the world, then he unfurls his soft underbelly again and pushes the blankets off. He needn’t have worried about disturbing anyone since he is alone. He dresses in the clothes left in a neat pile for him and follows voices to the kitchen.

The table is set with bread and cheese, sliced vegetables, an easy meal around which to conduct a debate. It seems to have been going for some time. Booker leans against the wall and waits to see what has been decided.

“You heard what Quynh said.” Nile states, standing firm and again for forgiveness. “She’s not only a danger to us. She’s a danger to _everyone_. But we can’t just lock her away again. We need to find her and talk to her. We need to help her.”

The three of them – Andy, Nicky and Joe – they want this to be the answer, Booker can tell. They have worn this weight around their necks for so many centuries that the chance to unburden themselves must be beyond temptation. Joe and Nicky are nodding slowly, while Andy looks at them all, weighs up where they fall compared to her barely restrained desire to jump in the ocean and swim back to Quynh without saying another wasted word.

“Book,” Andy turns to him finally and asks the question. “Booker, what do you think?”

 _She drowned me_ , he wants to say. _She strung me by my neck._ But Booker thinks many things he knows are childish. So what if she did? They cannot punish someone made mad by the likes of what was done to her. She is a butterfly pinned to a board without the mercy of formaldehyde. She has aspirations of deification – an immortal with delusions of grandeur seems a dangerous thing to be left loose indeed. She is their sister. What is his little suffering in the face of all that?

Booker swallows and wrings his hands together. For all their freedoms, they have so few choices. In this second, he can pretend at grace. Perhaps he can make this forgery real if he is skilled enough. “Bring her- Bring her home.”

Andy seems to hear all he hasn't said because for a moment she looks caught between sadness and relief. "All right. We'll go find her."

There. The decision is made.

Planning begins next. In the past, this is where Booker would be at his busiest, tracing her steps and organising infil, exfil, surplus requirements. But now they have Copley who can do today’s job just as well. Probably better, Booker thinks, since he hasn’t been pickled in brine for the last few days. They also make it gently clear that they prefer Booker stay on the periphery. He can see that by necessity they have learned to do this without him. So. He will stay at the safe house. He will stay out of trouble. They don’t trust him at their backs, which they don’t say but it is what he expects is true. A pragmatist to his bones, Booker would not trust someone who had done the same as he.

There are just hours before they go – it must be done quickly before they lose Quynh’s scent. Joe and Nicky are talking quietly to each other in the next room. Andy is outside. Nile has heated up canned stew, the texture of which is… ah, it’s almost certainly edible and that’s all he’ll say about that.

“At least we won’t have the dreams anymore,” she says. Nile has an excellent poker-face but Booker has the advantage of canny experience. She’s fishing, though he is certain one of the others baited the hook. So he eats a mouthful and smiles wryly.

“I hadn’t had the dreams of Quynh for a long time. They fade eventually, you see,” he says, the old familiar lie. What does it hurt to tell it again. His dreams never helped them in their search – they were only hurt by the retelling of her imprisonment. To be made a tool for inflicting pain upon them, it was – well. His cowardice won out and he let them believe the dreams were gone and perhaps her suffering was over. By doing this, he could often fool himself also. Was that such a sin?

Nile nods, slowly accepts his words, and pokes at the stew with her fork. “That’s a relief. In case one of us is dropped in the ocean in a cage again for hundreds of years by medieval zealots during a literal witch hunt. It’d be a shame for a new guy to have to go through it too.”

He laughs, and is surprised by it. He is so relieved for Nile, that she has been able to do what he could not. Be comfortable with her eternal life, have the strength to give up her family, live with grace and humor. Booker is certain it wasn’t easy for her, but she took the hardness of it all and let it shape her into something strong and kind. It’s no wonder Andy found her lost will within Nile’s company. He hopes desperately it survives Quynh’s resurgence.

They eat together and it is just – it is nice. Nile tells him about the last six months, mentions the team’s need for downtime and peace without editorialising on why. Booker is quiet, listens, hoards each second like a miser. Then it is time for the team to go. Andy is barely present so walks out the door like a rope is pulling her towards Quynh. Joe hasn’t forgiven him and so offers him only a glance as he leaves. Nicky also hasn’t forgiven him but is somewhat gentler in his reproach, kissing Booker’s cheeks before he goes, tells him they are taking the car and so his motorcycle is in the garage in case of and only for emergencies. Nile ignores what she clearly considers dramatics and knocks on the door frame. “Wish us luck.”

Booker salutes her with his cup, currently filled only with tea since he couldn’t find a single bottle of liquor in the entire house. He’d eyed the bottle of methylated spirits under the bathroom sink and sulkily shut it away instead. “You won’t need it.”

Then they are gone. He sits for half an hour, to be certain, drinking cup after cup of bitter tea. Finally Booker picks up Joe’s pencil and notebook, chiefly because it will aggravate him, and writes his message on Joe’s drawing of him sleeping. Leaves the notepad open on the table. He lingers a moment in the echoes of their voices, their bodies. It would be easy to tear the note up, unpack his meagre bag, settle on the couch and wait for them to return. He shuts the front door instead, lets the lock catch.

It may be over two hundred years late but Booker will learn courage and conviction. A hundred years was the sentence. A hundred years is what he’ll serve.

And since they aren’t likely to tack extra time on for theft, and because it will make Nicky laugh and then be annoyed again at his own amusement, Booker hotwires his precious motorcycle on which to make his escape.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from (Past-Due) by The Weakerthans.


	5. Now Run As Fast As You Can Through This Field Of Trees

“There is no stillness, only change. Yesterday’s here is not today’s here. Yesterday’s here is somewhere in Russia, in a wilderness in Canada, a deep blue nowhere out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It’s behind the sun, it’s in deep space, hundreds of thousands, millions of miles left behind. We can never wake up in the same place we went to sleep in. Our place in the universe, the universe itself, it all changes faster and faster by the second. Every one of us standing on this planet, we’re all moving forwards and we’re never ever coming back. The truth is, stillness is an idea, a dream. It’s the thought of the friendly, welcoming lights still shining in all the places we’ve been forced to abandon.”

― Steven Hall, _The Raw Shark Texts_

Booker is, in one sense, a farmer. Every few years he plants seeds, checks his crops, harvests them as needed. Only he grows identities, fraudulent family trees, names and passports. He plucks one such fruit now and becomes Guglielmo D'Ignoti, a Sicilian national, an itinerant with dark brown hair, brown eyes and no family to speak of. He shaves his beard, grown out from stubble, into a moustache, because when a man has a moustache that is all people remember about him. His teeth are yellowed by years of cigarettes. He is born in a bathroom at the La Spezia port, he will live for approximately forty days upon the container ship Booker has booked passage on, and then he will pass into nonexistence when he arrives on a distant shore.

In another, much more literal sense, Booker is a criminal. He has been as long as he can remember and so breaking the laws of the day comes as naturally to him as breathing. This is why he pays a lot of cash to the captain to overlook the need for a passport or allowing any other passengers on board. It is also why Booker sells Nicky’s motorcycle to a local drug runner for much less cash. The team may trace him this far but his scent will deadend. They will not expect him to make his way from here across the sea, not after recent events, so they may continue up the coastline or they may give the chase up for bad sport.

The freighter departs with Booker ensconced on board, berthed in a small cabin with a single bed, a tiny bathroom, and a miniscule porthole window. Each morning, he checks for regrowth in his hairline then ruffles the brown strands into a shaggy mess that falls in his face, blinks the coloured contacts onto his eyes, swishes a little discolouring dye in his mouth, smokes a cigarette or two to wreathe himself in its musk, and dresses in his outsized clothes. These little misdirections are enough to bring Guglielmo to life.

The freighter departs and his journey begins.

The days are consistent in routine. Booker reads from the small pile of books left behind by previous passengers and whatever he can scavenge from the workers on board. He spends many nights out on deck under the stars, which are beautiful and bountiful. There is nominally no alcohol on board, but Booker is yet to meet a sailing crew that doesn’t have a still somewhere in the bowels of their ship and a ready supply of rot gut spirits. He slips cash to a man once a week who hands over a refilled bottle in return.

The wi-fi is a wavering thing but it’s enough for Booker to open his laptop once, after two weeks have passed. Copley has left a coded message. They are safe, they are together, they have Quynh. They are quite mad at him for disappearing with just a short note. If he needs help, he is to contact Copley via the Port-au-Prince drop. Otherwise they seem to be leaving him to his own devices. Booker replies with confirmation of receipt and a vague implication that he is planning to relocate to the safehouse in South Africa for a time.

He dines with the captain who talks of rogue waves, towering mountains of water that roam the ocean, removing all trace of ships and crew. Of snow off falling on the ocean off the Iceland coast and of the Northern Lights arcing ribbons across the sky. The captain believes in ghosts and of submariners haunting the ocean, their lost boats said to be Still On Patrol. The captain is superstitious and he likes Booker, because Booker enjoys his stories, so he talks and talks and Booker has only to listen and eat.

When they cross the equator some of the ship hands arrange a celebratory boxing tournament, hold King Neptune’s Court and then give each other terrible commemorative tattoos of shellback turtles. 

The sun rises and falls. The moon dashes across the sky. Whales sing in the distance and dolphins leap in front of the ship’s bow.

Booker sleeps poorly. His dreams are vivid and he wakes in pools of sweat. He dreams of Quynh, mostly. Just strange nightmares about her following him through the decks of the boat, a trail of water behind her, the dripping of salty spray from her fingertips. Sometimes of the team, of trying to find them and being told they are gone forever, they are lost, they have all died and left him behind.

On his second last day he is told there is a special treat. Because they have entered the warmer current flowing from the Coral Sea, they have finally filled the pool on the lower deck. He cannot swim, he says. “But thank you all the same.”

Booker wakes from a dream and wearily wipes the clammy sweat from his brow. He waits until it is so late at night that it’s early morning, and all the ship hands are either busy working above deck or asleep. He stands at the edge of the pool, contemplating the black water, before methodically removing all his clothes and climbing down the ladder into the icy cold. He slips below the surface and releases the air in his lungs, sinks to the bottom. He breathes the water in.

When they all finally come face to face, it is a scant few days after Marie is buried. Claude and Jean-Pierre are outside, playing quietly or tending the chickens or avoiding him. Sebastian is sat at the kitchen table, slumped in a chair, a stinking, drunk mess. He can’t imagine how it is possible to feel grief so intensely that it numbs everything, but he has spent the last two hours knowing he should get up and make them a meal and utterly unable to dredge up any sense of desire to do a single thing but find her grave and crawl into it with her. He could pull the dirt over them both like a thick blanket.

The people from his dreams enter and he is so drunk he can barely talk. It has taken serious endeavour, since he doesn’t seem to stay drunk for long anymore despite his best efforts.

“This is a waking nightmare,” he slurs. “Stop haunting me. Leave me be.”

The two men say something he doesn’t understand and then the woman looks at him, eyes hard and worried. She replies to them in their language and gestures at Sebastien. They step forward, pick him up by his arms and carry him out behind his house, past his children, and they toss him in the pond.

He splutters to the surface, cursing a blue streak. Both his sons are being held back, Claude struggling against the woman’s tight grip, but Jean-Pierre, his little brave boy, kicks the darker man in the shin and runs into the pond after him. He seems torn between pulling his father to safety and jumping into his arms, attempting both. Sebastien, shocked by the water, is coordinated enough to swing Jean-Pierre into his arms and stagger to the shallows. Claude wrenches his arm free and runs to Sebastien’s side and there the three of them stand, facing the strangers in soaking wet shock. 

“Come, Sebastien,” says the woman in terribly accented Limousin. “We must talk.”

Changed into dry clothes and having shooed his recalcitrant children to the next farm over, Sebastien does his best to maintain a clear mind, meaning he has diluted his whisky with tea and eaten a slice of bread. He must have answers, he must know what happened to him. He has to know if there is a way to share it. Perhaps even, he had the eager idea while struggling to pull on a shirt, tangled in his thoughts and shirtsleeves, he might still be able to save Marie and Henri. He comes back from death, after all. Why shouldn’t they?

But of course it isn’t so easy.

It is the woman, Andromache, who explains all to him over his kitchen table, while Yusuf and Nicolo fill in any blanks that they can. They ask about Russia, about his time as a soldier. About hanging and escaping. They have seen it all, apparently, in their dreams, just as he saw them. He is one of them now, they say, and there is nothing he can do about it. They say the dreams are how they find each other and that they’ll stop now. Andy asks if he understands what they’re saying and Booker forgets about the drowning woman since he has bigger concerns.

“Yes, yes, all of it. So how do I share it?” Sebastien asks, mind spinning ahead already. He’ll be able to dig Marie up easily, but Henri has been buried for months. Will it be messy, he wonders. Gruesome, surely, but worth it. “How do I give it to my wife, my son?”

They all exchange a look.

“You can’t.” Andromache says, certain as stone. “Sebastien, this immortality is yours alone to bear.”

“Mmm, no,” he refuses, categorically. “Of course they will join me. But you see I can’t remember how it started. Was it the cold? The hanging?”

“You can’t share it,” she says again. “We don’t know how or why. It just happens. But it’s only us. And now you. Listen to me closely, Sebastien. Your sons will grow old, get sick, be hurt, and one day they will all be dead, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

As far as explanations go, it leaves something to be desired in sensitivity. But Andromache isn’t done yet.

“You can’t stay with them. Not for much longer. Haven’t you noticed? You will never age a day older than you were at the moment of that first death. But they will grow up and soon everyone will see that there is something unnatural about you. It will bring dangerous attention upon all your heads. For your protection, for theirs, you cannot stay. You must come with us.”

“I am not leaving them.” Sebastien dismisses that idea, throws up a hand, the decision final. “I am not coming with you. I’m not leaving my family. They need me.”

Andromache stares at him for a moment, glances mercilessly around the detritus-filled room, before rising from her seat. “I’m sorry. We’ll stay a little while and help you adjust and understand. You aren’t alone in this, Sebastien, though I know it’s hard for you to see.”

Andromache, Nicolo and Yusuf stay for a month, looking after his sons as Sebastien tries to stop foundering on the rocks of heartbreak. They do their best to mend the sails of his soul, force feed his body, drag conversation out of him, offer what little insight they have as to why _them_. Andromache, the warrior queen, says they fight to help others. Nicolo, the Crusader, says it’s because they _can_ do good and therefore they should. Yusuf, the artist, who has turned out to be the friendliest and most normal of the three, which is to say he doesn’t spout off about historical events as if they happened only the morning before like Andromache or intone vaguely ominous heartfelt statements over eggs like Nicolo – Yusuf says it’s because they are family. Sebastien is not inclined to violence yet and he is aware there would be consequences from Nicolo, so he doesn’t hit Yusuf, though he desperately wants to at that moment.

It is Nicolo, the man of God, that Sebastien corners one evening, as he sits by the fire. Generally, he has found, if people are cagey about how they have done something, it is because they have done something they feel or know is a punishable offence. He can’t remember anything about this in all the laws he has bent or broken, so perhaps it’s time to look to the laws of a higher power.

“Nicolo, you can tell me and I will not judge you. Is it a deal with the devil?” Sebastien doesn’t actually believe in God, but he can’t imagine it’s a requirement when one sells their soul. In fact, it can only be for the best since he will barely notice the loss. “I will do whatever it takes, I will give everything. Please help me.”

The fire flickers strange lights against their faces, and Nicolo’s kind, honest strength radiates out like a punch to the guts and Sebastien knows his answer already. Nicolo puts a hand to his shoulder and grips him tightly. “Sebastien, whatever we are, it is not the Devil’s touch. This burden is given to us, only us, to do good works.”

 _Good works,_ Sebastien thinks darkly. He huffs unsteadily, waves away Nicolo’s concern, his touch, and pretends at casual humour. “No, no, of course not, it was just a thought, just a thought.”

None of them have any answers and Sebastien firmly places friendly distance between himself and them. Whatever he is, whatever they are, he will not give up his sons. He learns what it is to live every long and weary day without Marie and Henri, and the learning is a terrible thing. He cannot live without them as well.

When they finally leave, Andromache tells him they will check the mail at a particular address every few months. When he is ready to join them, he is to send word and they will find him. They seem to think it will not be very long before this happens. He swears to do so, lying through his teeth. They can keep their cursed family. Once they are confirmed to have left the region, Sebastien packs his and the boys’ belongings, changes their names, and moves everything to Paris. He will not see Andromache, Nicolo or Yusuf again for almost ten years.

The water in the pool dips back and forth as the freighter is rocked in high waves. It’s this motion that seems to wake Booker up from floating face down, splashing as he raises his head to cough, breathe in, and look about in panic. Jesus wept, anyone could have seen him. What was he thinking? Why did he– But there is no time for this, he could be found at any moment. Booker dresses quickly, uncomfortably pulling his clothes on over his wet body, and hurries back to his berth. Perhaps he has spent too much time on, around and in the ocean. He is becoming sullen and strange. Time is losing its forward momentum, it seems. He cannot shake Quynh’s spectre.

It’s for the best that tomorrow his sea journey comes to an end.

Booker opens his laptop and the contact he was avoiding. Soon he will need all his sharpness and cannot be distracted by looking backwards. Through old, hidden channels, Copley has again left word and Booker has to check it now before he begins setting a new trail, disappears completely. He trills his fingers against each other as the slow wi-fi groans into submission. But it isn’t a message from Copley. It is a blessing, an embrace, a farewell.

_Be safe, Book._

He misses Andy so terribly.

The eastern seaboard of Australia begins to crest the horizon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from ‘Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors’ by Editors. The alternative song choice was 'The Girl Of My Dreams (Is Giving Me Nightmares)' by Machine Gun Fellatio, which is an absolute Booker/Quynh vibe.


	6. O Yes, I Have Seen It Too, Just A Little Different From How You Do

‘Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.’

Czeslaw Milosz, _Longing_

“When the world ends,” Andy says in Greek, in a put-upon voice, “There are two living things that will survive. Cockroaches and Australians.”

It’s 1995, and they are in Bhutan, a country that only just began to let in tourists in any number in the past few years. At the next table over, two Australian men sit, exchanging jokes and stories, befriending the staff, drinking spirits, generally being voluble and raucous. Andy’s right. It’s almost impossible to find any corner of the world where the strident Antipodean accent doesn’t sooner or later rise over the sound of the crowd. Booker imagines the country must be empty, for all its citizens prefer to travel.

Andy takes herself back to their rooms. She has been increasingly uninterested in engaging with people, impatient and bored. Booker makes her come out with him, eat with him, but as technology develops at greater and greater speed, she’s less and less willing to spend time amongst crowds. She reads newspapers, watches the news, listens to the radio and the turn of her lips is bitter. Booker watches her go, as do the two men. Andromache, a living goddess, everyone in the room should watch her go and feel the sweep of her presence. The men see Booker seeing them and they give him a caught wave. They lure him to their table with friendly grins, tall tales and jokes and many, many bottles of alcohol, which they drink with alacrity.

The conversation carries on, drifts into hypotheticals on the best places to hide from arrest. The two men, it becomes clear, have both had brushes with the law. Booker proposes a variety of locations in Europe and the pair of them scoff.

“You’ve got to be joking. You can’t turn around for people and that’s where you want to hide? Fuck that, go back home and go bush. Go out past Lightning Ridge and no one’s gonna see you for years.”

Australia, they insist, is the only place to truly disappear.

“Mate, forget the outback, the flies alone’ll drive you mad. The Blueys are the place to go. That bush cover’s no joke, no one’s gonna spot you from overhead and the terrain is a killer for cars. And I’ll tell you what, no one up there will tell the cops jack shit. Even the local coppers up there hate talking to other cops.”

“Mate,” says his friend, drawing out the ‘a’ like a cawing crow, “Find a shack on an old fire trail, get some supplies, and you’re so off the grid you might as well be on another planet.”

They finish the bottle in a round of shots and order another. Booker finally stumbles back to the team’s rooms hours later, falls through the shower curtain into the bathtub when he tries to drink from the bathroom sink, and Joe throws a shoe at him. But in the morning, when he wakes up, thankfully without the reward of a hungover, he remembers what the men had said and he begins to investigate and plan.

Booker departs the freighter in Newcastle. He is not supposed to, but a last generous payment to his friend, the captain, allows Guglielmo to set off. Booker has bought a car, a 4WD that is covered in dents and scratches, which he collects from a prearranged carpark. He finds an unlocked petrol station bathroom, where he shaves off his ridiculous moustache, buzzes his hair short, removes the contacts and becomes Michael ‘Mick’ Robinson, Australian citizen, born in France and emigrated to Australia when he was fifteen.

He drives for hours along roads and freeways, through urban sprawl and scraggly brush, until the hills rise into mountains and the mountains are covered in dense growth. The Blue Mountains, he thinks, sound like something out of Tolkien. The Blue Mountains. So called because of the vast eucalypt forests emitting their oil, scattering short wavelength rays, changing the way the light fractures on its way to the earth. The mountains look blue, he has read, though he hasn’t never seen it for himself. Not until now. He is looking forward to it. Andy had lived a life in Australia, with her beloved Achilles, but not here. This place is his alone.

He picks up a supply of fresh foods and glasswear for a still, some young hens, and he drives, following a map he memorised long ago. The freeway becomes a smooth road, becomes a pot-holed road, becomes an unpaved road, becomes a still-used fire trail, becomes a long defunct fire trail, and finally it comes to dense bush and he cannot continue any further by car. He gets out, checks his sat-nav, and hikes for several hours up rocks and through dense scrub before he arrives at a small structure hidden under the eucalypts towering overhead. The hut is barely two rooms and has a stockpile of canned goods, basic kitchen utensils, a bed, and an outhouse. He makes the trip back and forth several times from the car until he has transported everything he brought with him. The chickens held in cages in particular made for interesting hours.

In total he hikes back and forth four times, and it takes him twenty five hours. Finally he spends time covering the car with branches, sweeps the tire tracks away for a hundred metres, drags fallen logs across the trail, and at long last returns to the hut. He takes a satisfied long swallow from his flask, settles in and lets the long years of his life fall away.

Les Trois Glorieuses, they call it later. Charles X, the fool, believes he can supress the civil unrest from his ordinances. But the Parisian summer is long and hot, and the people’s blood is angry.

Claude is shot in the riots on the second day and Sebastien finds him in Jean-Pierre’s little apartment, on his bed with his brother by his side, soaking the sheets in blood. Sebastien sees the wound and feels ill.

Jean-Pierre leaves his side and comes to Sebastien, eyes red and so distracted he has no energy to spare towards resenting his father. Now there is only desperation.

“You have to help him. I know you can. You can save him.”

Claude, who had taken after him the most, tall and strong, beloved by his friends for his disarming cheer, by his wife for his constancy, clever and determined and stubborn. Sebastien had not been at the wedding, had been told not to come, though he tried to watch from across the way, tried to send his blessings across the distance and stand witness as best he could.

Now Sebastien holds Claude’s hand, stroking his cheek. Smiles reassuringly, tells him everything will be okay, everything will be okay.

“Please, papa,” Claude gasps at last through his shivering lips. “Please. I don’t want to- I’m- I’m scared. Was I brave?”

Then, before Sebastien can find the words to comfort him, he is gone.

Sebastien grips Claude’s limp hand tightly and grits his teeth so hard that sharp pains shoot through his jaw. Tears drop from his unblinking eyes. He waits and hopes.

“Save him,” Jean-Pierre encourages, shaking his shoulder. “Papa, do it now.”

Nothing happens. Claude doesn’t breathe again. His first child, his little Claude, who Sebastien had taught to swim and read and tie his shoes. Sebastien had been so scared to hold him at first, this tiny helpless creature that he and Marie had made. Then once he rocked Claude in the cradle of his arms he never wanted to give him up. The first revelation of his life, something to love without end, without reason, with everything sweet inside him.

Sebastien releases one low noise, a grating from deep within, and can do nothing.

Jean-Pierre pushes him roughly, says he is useless, worse than useless, he is a curse upon them all, and tells him to leave, get out, don’t come back, weeps and pushes him again out the door, where Sebastien trips and falls as the door slams and inside he can hear Jean-Pierre’s cries but can do nothing to soothe them away.

Booker learns to love the deafening chorus of cicadas in summer. He listens to the bell birds, the whip birds, the currawongs. He does battle with goannas over the chicken eggs and watches green tree snakes coil up in the brush. He is bitten once by a brown snake he didn’t see under his bare feet and once by a funnel web spider in his shoe, which he was diligently putting on for protection from snakes. He names the giant huntsmen spiders that seem to prefer living exactly on the ceiling over his bed and nowhere else in the hut. He learns to check the outhouse toilet for redback spiders.

Bushfires burn in the distance sometimes and very, very nearby at others. He is very, very lucky that the winds blow in his favour. One awful week he can see the towering flames and ash falls from the sky for days. The taste of smoke becomes a familiar thing.

The gum trees begin to distinguish themselves, and Booker learns the scribbly gums from the paperbarks, the mallees from the blue gums. He watches the golden wattle blossom in spring. He listens to the wind in the gum leaves and reads books and washes from the rain-water tanks. Possums make a racket on his roof at night and flying foxes screech in the dusk light and at dawn wallabies linger in the grass, freezing when he opens the door to tip his tea leaves on the ground and then bounding away.

This is how time passes.

Like someone testing a hot bath by slowly dipping in their toes, so it goes with Sebastien joining the team. He comes to them, stays for weeks or months and then leaves again, circling the last of his family like a moth to a light. They accept his feline presence, although it must test their patience. In the meantime, they decide to teach him how they each like to fight and it is a trying time for everyone. Anne is beyond skill, beyond talent. Her form, says Nicholas, is perfect, although Sebastien can’t tell the difference between perfect and merely good enough. There is nothing Anne doesn’t know about the art of war and of battle, Joseph says, and Sebastien thinks he is trying to be encouraging and not terrifying.

They each like to carry a bladed weapon but their attempts to teach Sebastien a love for the sword are going poorly. He prefers boxing, wrestling, guns and explosives. He enjoys games. Puzzles. Outthinking his opponents and winning not by brute force but by positioning them as such that they themselves choose a path to loss. Anne says it’s lazy and he needs to practice more. Sebastien thinks it’s smarter. The result is what counts, after all. Joseph tries to teach him a passion for Tahtib. Nicholas, the long sword. Anne, the axe, the sabre, the bō; every weapon she can think of. None of them catch hold. He learns, of course, but it is perfunctory, without grace. Sebastien frustrates them because they think he is not trying. Violence is a means to an end for him, but for them it is an art form.

They duel each other, forever honing their skills. Sebastien learns and learns and learns and loses and loses and loses. But one of his natural talents, which for once he brings to the team and not the other way round, is his ability to find or create a weakness. In how someone fights, in a business agreement, in an argument, in the security of a building. If there is a loophole or cranny through which to wiggle, he will sniff it out with the nose of a bloodhound. So after thousands of lessons and losses and planning, Sebastien finally beats Nicholas in a duel. They don’t often fight to the death but Anne insists they practice it every now and then, so they are prepared for it in the heat of the moment. Nicholas’s weakness right now is not in his skill, because he is a much, much more experienced duellist than Sebastien, but in his belief that Sebastien won’t kill him in order to win. Sebastien has refused to strike a killing blow for months in preparation for this single fight, to create this belief. So Nicholas leaves, for just a moment, his defences open for Sebastien’s blade, and Sebastien wins his first duel by slicing his throat.

Joseph steps forward, kneels down and clutches Nicholas’s open throat, looks at Sebastien in shock. Sebastien allows himself a smile. It’s a satisfying thing.

“Again,” says Anne after a moment’s consideration, relentless, picking up her sword. She sinks into the first stance and gestures for him to do the same. This pattern will repeat for decades, for all kinds of martial arts and fighting styles. Sebastien picks the sabre up. They repeat the sequence many times over the years, but he never carries a long blade into a fight.

Booker realises one morning that he hasn’t so much as touched a weapon in years. He is drinking a mug of strong black tea, and watching his chickens scratch through the undergrowth, their bobbing heads, the way they simply are chickens and nothing more or less. The autumn sun is warm, though there are cool edges to the wind in the trees. The delight of Australia’s mid-east coast is that the seasons are temperate and so blur together so easily. Summer is hot, yes, with a constant threat of bushfires, and winter in the Blue Mountains are cold, and it might snow once or twice a year, but it’s nothing like an equatorial or arctic climate. The leaves don’t turn and fall from the trees. Time here moves differently, like thick syrup. Booker feels a weight lift from his shoulders as he removes himself from the world. Here he can’t hurt anyone, just step lightly upon the earth. Here, in the thick bush, he is reminded that the world will outlast him. Somewhere the Mountains hide a pocket of ancient Wollemi pines, the precious last of their kind, the location of the dinosaur trees hidden so people can’t visit them and accidentally damage them by doing so.

Every few years he arranges for the sale of his property from one of his identities to another fresh one, a new face, a new background. He leaves every six months or so to stock up on supplies, careful to avoid anywhere with cameras or surveillance. He drives to Wollongong or Bowral, towns large enough to have what he needs, then returns to his little home, his enclave. He thinks every now and then of the team, of checking up on them or reaching out, and then sets the thought aside and goes to feed some seed to the rainbow lorikeets that have taken to gathering on his table outside in the afternoon. Their chirps and little hopping jumps from seed to seed distract him, pull him back to wild nature and away from the world of people. In the morning, the warble of magpies wake him gently from his dreams and during the hot midday sun, the demonic shrieks of the sulfur-crested cockatoos flying like white poltergeists overhead make him laugh and laugh. They are nuisances in the way only a gang of large intelligent birds can be.

He feels as hidden as it’s possible for a person to be in the modern world, like a turtle secure in its shell. As a result, he relaxes. Puts down his sorrow, which feels like it belongs to someone else, another man who he barely remembers from another age. He unmakes Sebastien Le Livre, Sebastiano Lamberti, Shep Bookman, Booker – everyone he has ever been. Here he doesn’t need a name. He exists in this floating state for thirteen years. Are they happy? He cannot say. But they aren’t entirely unhappy. He will spend the century here and maybe turn into stone, be part of the landscape, ageless as the mountains themselves. He will find the Wollemi pines, curl up at the base of one and go to sleep there in the ancient grove.

It’s unfortunate that he feels so safe. It means that when Merrick’s Dr Kozak turns up at his door with a slew of armed men, Booker has no means to defend himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from ‘There Is No Such Place’ by Augie March.


	7. Into A White And Soundless Place

“I could introduce myself properly, but it's not really necessary. You will know me well enough and soon enough, depending on a diverse range of variables. It suffices to say that at some point in time, I will be standing over you, as genially as possible. Your soul will be in my arms. A color will be perched on my shoulder. I will carry you gently away.”

― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

The shell game, also known as thimblerig, find the pea, or the old army game, is an honest game in that everyone knows that it’s rigged, everyone knows they aren’t supposed to win. The fun of the shell game is pretending you might. It is a simple game to play. There are three shells and a hard pea. The pea is placed under one of the shells, which are moved around until the guesser loses track of the pea’s location, then the guesser must choose a shell.

Sebastien Le Livre is born in the port city of Marseille in 1770. His father is a mystery and his mother is killed in a food riot when he is three. He is taken in by their neighbour, for a time, then when he grows enough to be a problematic mouth to feed, he is passed on as an apprentice to an unscrupulous man who catches him picking pockets one unfortunate afternoon.

Guillot Andrepont teaches Sebastien to read, which Sebastien loves and would spend all day doing if he could. Guillot gives him the name Le Livre as a goading gesture, but Sebastien likes it and decides to keep it, as a goading gesture right back. They are often at odds with each other, even as Guillot teaches him that the law is best viewed as a guide to how most people will behave in any given situation. Most people don’t like to break the law because they fear the consequences so they are often predictable. The consequences of Sebastien not following Guillot’s lessons is that he doesn’t eat or he sleeps outside or on the worst occasions takes a corrective beating. Guillot is a fool who gets caught up in a stupid scheme involving clipped coins, and he is executed one fine afternoon, after which Sebastien is thankfully free to decide his future.

Sebastien learns the shell game by watching, fascinated, as people play it on street corners. This is the first game that Sebastien learns to run on people where he feels everyone understands what is happening. Not picking pockets or creating distractions so he can make off with a loaf of bread. No, this little game is filled with willing participants who gamble their money with a smile, knowing the truth is a lie. He takes to the shell game like a duck to water. He has nice eyes, people tell him, a sweet smile. It’s a spring reverie, for warm days when the air is fresh and people’s minds are lively. Spring is when anything feels possible and so this is the time when people think they might be able to beat the shell game. And even if they can’t, they don’t mind because it is nice for a moment just to play.

One day when he is fifteen and growing into his shoulders a girl comes up to his little shell game table and looks steadily at him when he crinkles his eyes at her, smiles crookedly, offers a little compliment about her hair. It is blonde, bleached from the sun, and her skin is brown, bronzed from the sun. Her hands are rough. She has a snubbed nose and the wry turn of face of someone who doesn’t expect much attention. She’s not pretty, but she is interesting and she has eyes the colour of the ocean in a storm, green and grey and blue and dark. A fisherman’s daughter, he thinks. 

She places down a single sou. It is not much, but he displays the pea anyway with his little showman’s flourish and hides it under a shell. The girl doesn’t follow his hands like every person does when he begins the game, clever fingers moving the shells faster than anyone can track for long. No, she watches his face, the slightest hint of a smile growing like a flower on her lips. He is caught by her stare, held by it, entranced by her certainty. He stops finally and gestures for her to choose. She points. He doesn’t need to look down when he lifts the shell to know that there sits the little pea.

“What’s your name,” Sebastien asks.

She says, “Marie.”

Booker is drugged and drugged again, kept feeble and waking only in moments. Once he wakes enough to look at one of his guardians and ask if they let the chickens out. The man laughs, like it was a joke, and doesn’t answer. But if they haven’t let the chickens out, soon they will run out of water and die trapped in their roost. Booker supposes they must be dying or dead already, and the foxes will have them soon. It’s a silly thing to be sad about chickens, but there it is. He also asks how they found him. It doesn’t matter very much, but out of professional interest he would like to know what he did wrong this time. Kozak doesn’t answer, but he thinks back and wonders about the freighter’s captain or about one of his supply runs to Bowral where he noticed a new security camera installed in a building doorway or perhaps there is just nowhere to hide anymore.

He is transported to an island that he thinks might be off the coast of Indonesia, for the amount of time he can recall travelling and for the humidity when they arrive and he is taken from a plane to a van, and then from the van to the inside of a building that looks like nothing from the outside.

Like many nondescript things, the inside reveals its truth. It is a laboratory, with beds and restraints and one more surprise.

Joe is strapped to one of the beds and he is furious.

“Hello, Joe,” Booker says, slurred through a happy haze of drugs. “What on earth are you doing here?”

It is to Joe’s credit that he doesn’t actually have a rage-induced aneurism.

Kozak wheels over a tray, on which there are scalpels and syringes. She explains they have been able to stop the resurrection of their cellular structure, even slow it down, but not reproduce it in any test subjects. In fact, what it mostly does is kill test subjects. What they need, she says, are a larger sample base. Joe is one of the pre-existing donors, she says, and they can continue without further unmarred tissue samples from him so they will test if his regeneration can be stopped and then started again. Booker will test the slowed regeneration since they can take samples from him while it is slowed and that will tell them more too. Kozak moves towards Joe, who as it turns out, has been proactively spending the time she was speaking dislocating his thumb and freeing his arm.

For just a moment in the ensuing commotion Booker is left unwatched with the tray. And while he hasn’t performed any sleight of hand in over a decade, and while he feels clumsy from the drugs, the shell game is simple enough for a child to perform. Then the guards in the room remember him, kick his knees out from beneath him and hold him to the ground.

Finally Joe and Booker are both strapped to beds and Kozak is calmly pulling on a pair of gloves.

“This shouldn’t hurt,” she tells Joe. “But if you feel anything unusual, please say so. It will help us to understand the results.”

“You won’t find what you’re looking for,” Joe says to her, certain and vicious. “You’re wasting your precious time.”

In the needle goes and Joe gives Booker a frantic look as she depresses the plunger. Kozack steps back and watches unsteadily beeping machines, monitors incoming results, takes notes. The effect of the needle begins to take hold and Joe’s pupils dilate. He blinks slowly, like he is far away.

“Sebastien, do you remember the, uh, the _farasha_ ¸ the uh, the glass butterfly. Greta Oto, that’s it. Do you remember?”

“Costa Rica,” confirms Booker, nodding encouragingly. “Nineteen… sixties? Sixty eight?”

“ _Oui_ ,” Joe slips, slurs, pulling against his restraints, unable to break free. “They were everywhere. Little windows. You smiled and even Andy was happy then. It’s… it’s a beautiful world.”

“Tell Nicky,” he mumbles, trails off, his eyes drifting shut.

“Tell him what,” prompts Booker urgently, after a period of silence. But Joe doesn’t answer.

The shell game is a gamble with terrible odds.

Kozak turns to Booker next and picks up the remaining syringe. She swabs his arm, a curiously tender gesture, and then it is just the slightest of stings and it is done. There is a haziness then, a tingle in his limbs, but whether it’s his body healing or his body reacting, he can’t say.

The doctor leaves the lab, answering her phone, smiling and laughing with whoever has called her. Joe is unconscious or dead. Booker can’t tell from where he lies. It’s been a long time since Booker had a captive audience in him and the quiet is suffocating now Booker is used to the susurration of the wind in a vast mountain range of leaves. For a time, Joe had asked him to talk about Marie, perhaps thinking it might help, and Sebastien had refused, changed the subject, or ignored his questions. But now, now she feels so close. Standing just behind his shoulder, out of sight. Booker can share her a little. So he starts talking about the small moments that have been on his mind lately. How his wild domesticity in Australia had found something curled up in hibernation inside him, and woken it, where it crawled weak but determined out into the world.

“It’s not her kisses or her perfume that I have missed,” he explains finally. “It’s. It’s the way she feels so warm in the mornings before she wakes up, or – or how the boys would run around the house, making such a racket, and she would yell and put the fear of God in them. I never had the knack, you see, before – before they feared me for other things. It’s when the boys were little, and she would get a headache, so I would take them with me down to the docks to buy oysters, and I’d carry them all on my back and shoulders. I was the strongest man in the world for them then. When they were little, they loved me. I miss our stupid jokes that make no sense and no one else understands. So many things died with them.”

He turns and sees with relief that Joe is awake, head turned to watch him with sad, sad eyes. “You and Nicolo with your eternal love. You don’t know yet how these things matter when they’re gone forever. They will turn into knives you can’t pull from your chest and they’ll cut you every time you breathe.”

“Sebastien, you fucking moron, you have been a knife in our chests. God, I hate you. You idiot. You-you-”

Booker laughs wetly. Joe is joking. Or he is serious but loving, his hands clenched against the restraints and Booker knows if they were not tied down, Joe would be embracing him tightly right now. His long lost brother. “I’m sorry, Joe. I’m sorry.”

“I love you, you piece of shit, you asshole, fuck you sideways, _ade gamisou_ -“

It goes on like this for some time, before Joe gathers himself and surveys his body. “The drugs mustn’t work. Of course they don’t.”

He casts a spitting glare at the instruments next to him before he slumps back against the bed and sighs. “Why did you do it? I’ve wanted to ask for so long and you _hid_ like a bug under a rock so I couldn’t.”

Booker swallows and gathers his words. It’s been so long since he’s talked this much, his voice is a gravel-strewn path. “For a long time, I felt – watched Andy decline into apathy and each job we took only made it worse. Nothing made it better, no job improved things. Then the Joburg job in 2017 was a disaster and Andy refused to see any of us that whole year. I wanted to help. I thought there must be a smarter way, an easier way to help people. A way that would cost us less.”

Copley approached him and made an excellent pitch. They would help the world on a mass scale. Everything would be better. Sickness, disease, injuries – all of it could be healed and they could lay down the burden they carried. It. It wasn’t supposed to be capture and laboratories. They were going to _help_ people. And he would be able to offer it to Andy like a perfect gift, say to her: see, see, there is a goodness inside us still, if you want, you can rest. But it all unravelled so quickly, like stepping into quicksand and Booker had been lost in it, like a gambler laying all his chips on the table in the hopes of recouping his losses, he thought it would be worth it in the end, and the end was nothing but more nothing.

Joe, his friend, listens as he talks, and hears all he isn’t saying. Because Booker has always been creative and circumspect with the truth and Joe has been strapped to a table before with his beloved tortured next him because of it. “ _Why_ , Book?”

Then Booker must turn his head and his gaze back to the empty ceiling, where he is not required to meet anyone’s eyes. “Because I wanted to die. And he promised me I would be able to.”

Joe is silent until a nearby explosion shakes the room and he then looks in anticipation towards the door. “Ah. Here comes the rescue.”

When Andy comes through the door, something in Booker flutters and breaks free. It has been caged inside him since she walked away on that stone beach with unshed tears in her eyes all those years ago, a stone lodged somewhere within the bars of his ribs. Andromache, the cornerstone upon which they are all built. She has just a little silver in her hair, and she has love in her eyes when she looks at him. It is so much more than he deserves, to see her again and to see her happy.

“Book,” She doesn’t stop moving to unstrap Joe, though her attention is on him. “You with us?”

He nods, smiling, unable to help himself. Through the doorway comes the shape of his dreams, his nightmares, the voice he still sometimes hears in the dark.

“Quynh,” Booker breathes out. She looks like a blade, sharp and true, but her eyes widen when they meet his. There is so much between them but so little time. “Finally a God comes to my salvation.”

He means it as a joke but his humour has always been dark, even before he swung from a foreign tree, and while she once spent three days kissing his tears, ignoring the stench of his having soiled himself, soothing his hyperventilating breath, giving him chilled drinks, pushing him to the brink and holding him on the edge of an endless abyss, she doesn’t know him. So she only flinches and Andy steps in front of her.

“Not now. We need to move.”

When he first reaches out to the team, it is because he has fought again with his sons. They have caught him again at the work of forging assignats, now collector’s items worth more than when they were currency, and they disdain his money, would rather go hungry than take anything from him. Claude will speak to him a little, try to convince Sebastien that the right thing is worth any cost. Jean-Pierre thinks he is pitiful and worthless and won’t spare him a moment’s notice. They are both of them good men, they insist the government can be changed, that Charles X can be made to listen, and Sebastien only digs himself further into their bad graces when he tells them nothing will change no matter what they do, so they should leave Paris’s unrest and find somewhere quiet and safe. Take the fortune he has amassed through disgraceful means and live long, healthy lives. They tell him to come back only when he is a good man who will use what he ungratefully has to help others.

Andromache, Nicolo and Yusuf now go by Anne, Nicholas and Joseph. He might consider adjusting his name, they say. Sebastien scoffs at this until Joseph takes him aside and tells him the tragic story of Quynh. Sebastien understands now his dreams of the drowning woman, which he doesn’t have every night but come often enough that he had supposed he had developed some phobia of the sea. He tells Joseph about them, who tells Nicholas, who takes Anne aside and tells her. They drill him for details, and there is nothing he can say that helps them or helps Quynh. The only thing that helps is a consistent application of liquor, which Sebastien drinks like water.

Sebastien enjoys their company, is the thing. They take joy in their stories and they laugh when he gathers up all his charm and offers it to them. They are sad, sometimes, but his presence often seems to help. He distracts them from their history and they distract him from his. And when he is with them, he can pretend he is like them. That he believes in kindness and goodness too. The years pass and the stories begin to include him; a time he rides a horse into a house to cause a wild distraction, his expression at his first surprising taste of gur gur cha, an infamous trip to Constantinople which they all laugh at every time it is mentioned and he refuses to speak of, eating sour mango biche on the streets of Cartagena as the sun goes down. It isn’t all violence and death. Ah, but that is the trap. When the times are good, they are very, very good.

They are often like something from another age. He bemusedly watches their old-fashioned mannerisms. They help people, they say, but it is so often haphazard. They help people but they are baffled by the telegraph towers, the speed of communication. He tries to explain how it works to them, the strange and wonderful science, but they aren’t so interested in the how of it all. They ponder the why, in the confidence of their years insist that the world revolves and will not be interested in this for long, and again it is only Sebastien who quickly grasps what could come of it, the danger of this speedy exchange of information to them. It is Sebastien who keeps up with the rapid changes of the Industrial Revolution, the invention of the locomotive and the canals. It is Sebastien who shows them how to hide with forged identities and schemes, to disappear, to be ghosts in the modern age. He, without understanding the consequences, drags them behind him into the underground world of exchanged criminal information in order to find jobs where they can do some good without being seen. Before him they were a group of skilled fighters, a noble goal of aiding all the world. Now, for his sins, they become an army of well-meaning mercenaries.

Another explosion. Closer this time.

Andy unstraps him, hands him a pistol and he puts it down on the bed immediately, taking a moment to wrap his arms around her. He couldn’t do anything else, his body beyond choice or thought. He cups the back of her head and awkwardly kisses her ear because that is where his lips can reach. She squeezes him tight as a coiling python, for a moment, and then they part. There is no time for anything more.

“We have to destroy everything,” Booker says. “Or they will never stop coming.”

“Don’t worry,” Andy’s sly, satisfied smile is, as always, a revelation. “Nicky and Nile have been busy.”

They pick apart the defences as they exit the building. He slides in like a key into a lock, part of the dance, as though he has known the steps all along. How could he have ever thought that it would be like anything else. He has always been a shield at Andy’s back, so when a gunman appears with a clear shot at her, he doesn’t think at all before he steps in front of them, taking one bullet, two, to his chest as he shoots their thigh to distract them and Joe finishes them off. The pain of being shot is familiar; he keeps moving, pushed forward on adrenaline. He sees, for a moment, Marie as a girl, standing before him in the sun, calling his bluff.

They meet Nicky and Nile on the ground floor.

“All set, boss,” Nile looks at him, her face serious but with smiling eyes. Nicky clasps his shoulder for a single moment, then his face, Nicky’s hand firm and affectionate, before he looks to Andy and she leads them out of the building and away.

“You want the honors?” Nile holds a remote rigger to Andy. Andy takes the remote and she is Artemis, Hippolyta, Triệu Thị Trinh, Jeanne d’Arc, when she smiles and pulls the trigger. The building explodes in a glorious orchid of oranges and reds and blacks, hissing in the light drifting rain that falls almost like snow around them. There is a moment where they stand together and watch the building burn. Sebastien breathes in, tastes the air, feels the rain begin to run over his face.

“Copley’s working on finding out what else they have on us. You can help with that, Book,” Andy says, matter-of-fact, placing him back within the team, the prodigal son come home, and so Booker acknowledges her forgiveness and grace with an inclined head.

But he doesn’t think he will.

Exfil is via a boat at the dock, where they jump quickly aboard and make their escape. The team diffuses to compose themselves, each distracted by the work of taking stock in the aftermath of a job. Booker seats himself slowly, carefully against the side of the boat. His fingers and toes are cold but his stomach is a fire where the bullets struck. His dark clothing disguises it somewhat but when he touches his fingertips to his side and checks them, they come away blackly red with gore. _Good_ , he thinks. _It will be quick now._ His hands drop to his sides and he cannot lift them again. There is always a loser in the shell game.

Sebastien Le Livre has been a pickpocket, a forger and a criminal, a deserter and a soldier and a mercenary. A husband and a brother and a father. Perhaps even a good man, sometimes, in his way.

There is Andy, checking their heading. Quynh stands behind her, looking her over for injuries. There are Joe and Nicky, braced together as Joe shakes off the drugs. There is Nile, stowing their gear as they make for the far shore. The clouds part and the sun shines through the soft rain. The world is made of golden falling light. Joe was right, it’s all so beautiful; Sebastien wishes his family kindness, wishes the world will be better for them, wishes with all he has that time will touch them gently. The light shimmers until he cannot see and the last he hears is them laughing as they hold out their hands towards the glowing sky, waves lapping on the hull, and his heart. Oh, his heart is full.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title is from 'Love, Love, Love' by The Mountain Goats. It's one of the very first songs I listened to while writing this and I strongly recommend it.
> 
> I'm going to add one more chapter with supplemental materials in the next day or so, then ponder life for a while, and then potentially continue this from Quynh's point of view. We'll see how 2020 goes from here.


	8. Supplemental Materials

**Authors Notes (TW: mention and discussion of suicide, alcoholism)**

Thank you so much for reading 'The Heart Is A Badly Built Bridge' - it's my first fiction attempt in ten years, and it's been a delight getting back into writing. And guess who’s joined Tumblr! You can find me at [EnglishAsSheIsSpoke](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/englishassheisspoke). There is literally nothing on it at the moment but I do want to start answering prompts and challenges and just generally adding odds and sods there.

So, in March I quit my job and went and housesat for a friend for half a year. The pandemic kind of threw the world out of kilter and made doing something crazy seem really easy all of a sudden. I quit my job of four years because the position was incredibly stressful and had taken over literally every thought I was having, every moment of the day – I couldn’t fall asleep, I was catastrophizing, I was talking myself down from panic attacks way too frequently, and I had no idea what to do about it. Just absolutely trapped in my own head. I was surprised when my family and friends were surprised that I quit, but from the outside it apparently seemed like I was happy and thriving, while inside I was basically a wreck. I made bad decisions and hid what I was feeling because at the time it seemed to like the best thing to do. So finally I quit and went and lived in a friend’s house in the bush for five months with basically no one around and it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done. When I watched _The Old Guard_ and Booker started living rent-free in my head, I was like, this dropkick is not going to therapy. Like, in what world is this moron going to make a functional choice like that? And I thought that because it never crossed my mind either and it probably should have, but instead I ran away and became a full-on hermit in the mountains. Cut to a compilation video of Tatiana from RPDR saying ‘Choices’. 

I also thought a lot about how I would react if I died in a traumatic way, then came back to life, and then a group of strangers came up to me and told me to leave behind everyone I love and be an immortal do-gooder. Uh, hard pass, my friends. Like, the idea of living for six thousand years is legitimately terrifying. Then add on that Booker’s a functioning alcoholic who tries to be there for his family while he’s a depressed, trauma-riddled mess who makes bad decisions because they seem like the logical thing to do, and it’s no wonder it all goes sour. I feel incredibly sad for Claude and JP. I have a couple of friends with estranged parents and it often seems like the worst thing isn’t hating them for the disease but loving them but not wanting to see them or be around them because that hurts even more, and feeling like the bad guy for that choice. 

I find this quote from an interview with John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats, about 'Love, Love, Love' (the last song listed as a chapter title), encompasses a lot of what Booker struggles to manage:  
"The point of the song is, you know, that we are fairly well damaged by the legacy of the Romantic poets--that we think of love as this, you know, thing that is accompanied by strings and it's a force for good, and if something bad happens then that's not love. And the therapeutic tradition that I come from--I used to work in therapy--you know, also says that it's not love if it feels bad. I don't know so much about that. I don't know that the Greeks weren't right. I think they were--that love can eat a path through everything--that it will destroy a lot of things on the way to its own objective, which is just its expression of itself, you know. I mean, my stepfather loved his family, right? Now he mistreated us terribly quite often, but he loved us. And, you know, well, that to me is something worth commenting on in the hopes of undoing a lot of what I perceive as terrible damage in the way people talk about this--love is this benign, comfortable force. It's not that. It's wild, you know?"

I also didn’t want to excuse Booker, because he does a lot of damage in this story and as a result of his betrayal in the movie. Consequences are consequences and people around him are hurt by his choices. The poor goddamn team turning around finding his body, you know? Just what a fucking thing to do to them. But Booker sees it as the only choice and finds grace in it. Booker’s philosophy is ‘Whatever works’ and that’s a hard way to live, because it implies collateral damage both to himself and the people around him. Ah, but I love this sad, stupid, stubborn character. One thing I would like to do is maybe in follow-up stories go into his history with the team a little more, maybe explore just what happened in Constantinople and why they find it so funny – there is joy in their family and I unfortunately didn’t find a lot of space for it in this story, but it’s there in the corners.

Lastly, there are some holes in ‘The Heart Is A Badly Built Bridge’, partially because it’s from Booker’s point of view and he just doesn’t know or ask what’s going on a lot of the time, and partially because of the Land of Punt. People as a rule don’t write down things they think are obvious, and that’s how you lose track of an entire kingdom.

**Video resource**

This [short interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGMypR-fvkk) with David Le'aupepe, the lead singer and song writer from Gang Of Youths, is heartbreaking and inspiring and quite important to Booker's story. He talks about religion, love, being suicidal, about calling the right friend at the right time, going to rehab and his mental health. They also don’t go into it here because it’s a few years old but his father and ex-wife both passed away from cancer. The original version of ‘Blood’ by The Middle East is gorgeous but I love David’s gravelly voice and it feels very much like he sings this version from the very bottom of his heart. So the grief-filled moment in the [Like A Version video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLTO3U5644A) where he sings ‘And there’s nothing you can do about it now’ and then yells was probably the biggest inspiration for this story. At the end of the day, to me, this is a love story. And if you need cheering up, watch the Magnolia video afterwards and go kick some ass. In another, slightly different story, Booker lives and gets better and does just that.

**3 quotes that helped inspire this story:**

"The Australian forests are funeral, secret, stern. Their solitude is desolation. They seem to stifle, in their black gorges, a story of sullen despair. No tender sentiment is nourished in their shade. In other lands the dying year is mourned, the fall leaves drop lightly on his bier. In the Australian forests no leaves fall. The savage winds shout among the rock clefts. From the melancholy gum strips of white bark hang and rustle. The very animal life of these frowning hills is either grotesque or ghostly. Great grey kangaroos hop noiselessly over the coarse grass. Flights of white cockatoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls. The sun suddenly sinks, and the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-human laughter. … All is fear-inspiring and gloomy. No bright fancies are linked with the memories of the mountains. Hopeless explorers have named them out of their sufferings—Mount Misery, Mount Dreadful, Mount Despair. .... In Australia alone is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write. Some see no beauty in our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds who cannot fly, and our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all fours. But the dweller in the wilderness acknowledges the subtle charm of this fantastic land of monstrosities. He becomes familiar with the beauty of loneliness. Whispered to by the myriad tongues of the wilderness, he learns the language of the barren and the uncouth, and can read the hieroglyphs of haggard gum-trees, blown into odd shapes, distorted with fierce hot winds, or cramped with cold nights, when the Southern Cross freezes in a cloudless sky of icy blue.”

― Marcus Clarke, _Australian Tales (1896)_

“...unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.”

― Charles Yu, _How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe_

Rosencrantz: Do you ever think of yourself as actually dead, lying in a box with the lid on it? Nor do I really. Silly to be depressed by it. I mean, one thinks of it like being alive in a box. One keeps forgetting to take into account that one is dead. Which should make all the difference. Shouldn't it? I mean, you’d never know you were in a box would you? It would be just like you were asleep in a box. Not that I’d like to sleep in a box, mind you. Not without any air. You'd wake up dead for a start and then where would you be? In a box. That's the bit I don't like, frankly. That’s why I don’t think of it. Because you'd be helpless wouldn't you? Stuffed in a box like that. I mean, you'd be in there forever. Even taking into account the fact that you're dead. It isn't a pleasant thought. Especially if you're dead, really. Ask yourself: if I asked you straight off I'm going to stuff you in this box now – would you rather to be alive or dead?

Naturally you’d prefer to be alive. Life in a box is better than no life at all. I expect. You'd have a chance at least. You could lie there thinking, well, at least I’m not dead. In a minute, somebody’s going to bang on the lid and tell me to come out. (knocks) "Hey you! What's your name? Come out of there!"

Tom Stoppard, _Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead_

**The Extended Sad Bastard Soundtrack**

Utilities by The Weakerthans

Rabbit Will Run by Iron & Wine

Blood by Gang of Youths (originally by The Middle East)

Walking Far From Home by Iron & Wine

(Past-Due) by The Weakerthans

These Days by Powderfinger

Smokers Outside The Hospital Doors by Editors

The Girl of My Dreams (Is Giving Me Nightmares) by Machine Gun Fellatio

Nothingman by Pearl Jam

Fall At Your Feet by Clare Bowditch

There Is No Such Place by Augie March

Virtute at Rest by The Weakerthans

Love, Love, Love by The Mountain Goats

**Author's Note:**

> Story and chapter title are from 'Utilities' by The Weakerthans.


End file.
